Distribution apparatuses are often used in bottle transportation and packaging technology. Before bottles are packaged to packing units, they are filled and subsequently fed to further packaging machines. Herein, the bottles are often fed to the subsequent machines via a transportation conveyor. Further processing is then often carried out in a parallel manner on a plurality of plants. This means that the incoming bottle flow has to be distributed to at least two further machines.
The cylindrical bottles arrive on the first transportation conveyor in irregular distribution. In the area upstream of the separation into two transportation conveyors the bottle flow is centered on the conveyor. Centering is carried out by means of two pivotable flaps. The thus centered bottles can thus be distributed as statistically, i.e. uniformly as possible to the two subsequent transportation conveyors.
The prior art centering flaps are biased by means of springs. This is how the flaps are moveable so that different container flow widths can be handled. Different container flow widths can arise, for example, due to a tailback where the incoming bottles accumulate.
Problems can arise if more bottles impinge on one flap than on the other. The flap on which more bottles impinge opens wider so that the passage is decentrally arranged which leads to non-uniform displacement and therefore to non-uniform distribution of the container flow to the downstream conveyors.